Oh cool. I think the “Berkshire Hathaway revival” is less a new style trend and more a few companies trying to countersignal-maxx which is why I didn’t mention it. But maybe you’re right and it’ll become more popular.
Most of what you link to are serious websites which a lot of normal people use that are subject to strict accessibility requirements. I didn’t see a discussion of how sites might evolve where consistency of user experience is not a design goal. I think that playful and artistic websites could include image auto-generation as a reasonable extension of the retrofuturist theme, which could end up with weird or wonderful results based on execution. See https://haraiva.itch.io/novenahttps://wplace.live/
Nice roundup! It also seems like "UX/UI design" is out, while "product design" and "design engineering" are in. Dunno how this manifests in any of the specific design trends, though.
To me, the main differences between these terms is that "product design" and "design engineering" apply to a wider set of things (e.g. physical and not just digital products).
It’s odd that the LLM-designed websites are so purple, with the prompt not mentioning it. (Anecdotally, a website claude made for me also has a purple theme)
There's also what you could call the "Berkshire Hathaway revival" style, which uses almost no CSS -- e.g. SALP (https://situationalawarenesslp.com/), NFDG (https://web.archive.org/web/20250328161819/https://nfdg.com/ and https://aigrant.org/) or the old SSI website (https://web.archive.org/web/20250101043240/https://ssi.inc/)
h/t Jasmine Sun, who wrote a very nice three-paragraph thing a few months ago about trends in AGI-adjacent web design: https://joinreboot.org/p/macrodoses-7#%C2%A7a-site-for-every-soliloquy.
Oh cool. I think the “Berkshire Hathaway revival” is less a new style trend and more a few companies trying to countersignal-maxx which is why I didn’t mention it. But maybe you’re right and it’ll become more popular.
Yeah, I feel like there have been a lot of countersignal-maxxing websites in that way recently, but could just be availability bias!
Thanks for compiling these examples
Most of what you link to are serious websites which a lot of normal people use that are subject to strict accessibility requirements. I didn’t see a discussion of how sites might evolve where consistency of user experience is not a design goal. I think that playful and artistic websites could include image auto-generation as a reasonable extension of the retrofuturist theme, which could end up with weird or wonderful results based on execution. See https://haraiva.itch.io/novena https://wplace.live/
Yeah that's a good point - there's a lot you can do with generative models now.
Nice roundup! It also seems like "UX/UI design" is out, while "product design" and "design engineering" are in. Dunno how this manifests in any of the specific design trends, though.
To me, the main differences between these terms is that "product design" and "design engineering" apply to a wider set of things (e.g. physical and not just digital products).
It’s odd that the LLM-designed websites are so purple, with the prompt not mentioning it. (Anecdotally, a website claude made for me also has a purple theme)
It might just be that the the particular theme I went for (audiobook finder landing page) is associated with purple